‘Alarum’ Review – Sylvester Stallone’s Late-Career Phase Is In Full Swing

Alarum feels like the kind of bargain bin actioner you’d pick up by chance in the halcyon days of video rentals when a couple of marquee names on a cover were enough to tempt you into a distracting 90 minutes of quasi-entertainment. But it has delusions of grandeur. I’d have been happy enough with a movie in which Scott Eastwood, son of Clint, and Sylvester Stallone, presumably bored, team up to shoot legions of identikit henchmen for basically no reason at all. It’s the reason that becomes the problem.

Alarum has a plot, to be sure, but it’s hard to tell what it is or why we should care. The whole thing is kick-started by a flashback prologue so comically brief and unclear that it took me until much later in the movie, when another character asks Eastwood’s Joe outright what happened, that I realized he and his rival agent, Laura (Willa Fitzgerald, The Fall of the House of Usher), had absconded to get married.

This is a problem because Joe was working for a vague, clandestine U.S. government agency and Laura was working for the shadowy Alarum, a group of independent agents dedicated to bringing down the global intelligence apparatus. As a result, Joe’s former handlers believe he might have switched sides, so when he quite by chance stumbles across a vital flash drive – what else? – containing some state secrets, it becomes imperative that he’s eradicated before he hands the intelligence over to Alarum.

I think that’s what was going on, anyway. It’s deliberately a little unclear. For the purposes of dispatching Joe and retrieving the drive, the U.S. sends Chester (Stallone, seen most recently in Tulsa King), an openly psychopathic but aging triggerman who has some kind of very vague history with Joe. This is supposed to inject some ambiguity into proceedings but mostly plays out as the script – courtesy of Alexander Vesha – wanting to have its cake and eat it, too.

Sylvester Stallone, Willa Fitzgerald, and Scott Eastwood in Alarum | Image via Lionsgate

Joe is also under threat from Orin (Mike Colter, The Union), a French mercenary who’s after the drive. If you squint a little, you can see how all of these composite elements might have cohered into a serviceable little action plot. You’ve got the former U.S. agent whose loyalties might be elsewhere, the older mentor figure whose allegiances are deliberately unclear, a rogue element, and a secretive, vengeful government determined to cover things up at any cost. You could make that work.

Alarum doesn’t, though. It assembles a reasonably coherent throughline but then delivers it with sheer indifference, with so many characters so obviously uninterested in what’s happening that the effect quickly becomes contagious. It’s hard to buy into Joe and Laura as a couple so in love they’re willing to risk everything for each other because they barely seem to know each other. Stallone’s sleeping his way through a role that asks nothing of him beyond being able to put his name on the poster, and all of Colter’s physicality and innate sense of cool are wasted by a cloying Aristocats accent.

You’d think the action would save things. And it certainly helps. It’s much better than whatever is going on in Back in Action, for instance, another woeful action-comedy about aging stars doing clandestine work for quick paychecks. But it has a cheapness to it that is sometimes unintentionally amusing, as in a bit where Orin fires some grenades through a window and the projectiles have so clearly been added in post that it looks like someone’s college graphic design project.

Some of the amusing stuff is intentional, which is weird. It wouldn’t be right to call Alarum a comedy, or even to say it has an overtly comedic streak, since I’m not sure how much of the funny stuff is as written and how much of it is the actors not being bothered. But nonetheless there’s enough silliness to make the serious stuff seem even less so, which is perhaps the movie’s greatest feat.